“All childer’s love childer,” fenced Mrs. Schofield, but Tom was not satisfied.

“What’s a love child, Jack?” he asked his bosom friend.

Jack ruminated. Definition was not his forte.

“It means a lad’s mother’s nooan as good as she should be.”

Tom flushed hotly, and said nothing: but that night a village lad with lips much swollen slept with a raw beefsteak over his eye.

The germ of thought had been sown in the youthful mind. Why was he different from other lads? Time had been when in some confused sort of fashion he had looked on Mrs. Schofield as his mother and Mr. Black as his father.

“Mr. Black,” he asked one day, “where is my mother?”

It was a question that the Schoolmaster had looked for at every recent visit that he courted and yet dreaded.

It was on a Sunday noon as the congregation left the porch of St. Chad’s some lingering by the gateway to exchange neighbourly greeting, others sauntering with an air of unconcern to the door of the Church Inn across the way, whilst yet others still made with leaden foot to a recent grave to pay the tribute of the mourner’s tears.

Tom had been with other pauper lads in the gallery, a spot of vantage screened from the verger’s eye, and where it mattered to nobody what heed you took of the service or sermon so long as you did not make too much noise. He had made haste to get outside the churchyard so that he might not miss his ever gentle friend, the schoolmaster, and now stood by the village stocks outside the graveyard wall and watched the stream of worshippers pass slowly by. Presently his hand was in the schoolmaster’s, who turned his face to the road which led past the workhouse boundaries down to his own home at Diggle.

“Mr. Black, where is my mother?”

The schoolmaster paused, hesitated. They had left the rough and narrow road and crossed a stile into the fields. They were on the higher ground and could plainly see the churchyard. The loiterers had gone their homeward way or drifted into the Inn to seek a solace that is supposed to be appropriate alike in the glad hours of rejoicing and the heavy time of affliction.

“Your mother lies yonder,” said 

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